Review

Fractured almost to the point of being indistinct, but it's far too corporeal for that.

The charm of Don't Explain It, and most of the fun, comes from trying to figure just what it is. Part glitchy IDM, part hip-hop, part plunderphonics, part cluster headache-inducing madness, part dancefloor slayer, it's the kind of music that almost seems to taunt critics, laying down a sound that seems easy to grasp until you actually try and grasp it - really, the title of this EP sounds like an instruction.

Honestly, how can you explain the way that "Kidney of Bloom" works, with its sonic throwbacks to Silver Apples, its maddeningly familiar vocal sample (Scott Walker, is that you?), its skittish cut-up dialogue, and an aesthetic that allies itself to both rap outliers like cLOUDDEAD and pixy stix mainlining wonky producers like Rustie without ever really sounding like either? And yet work it undeniably does. Rustie's Glass Swords is as good a reference a point as any, I suppose, but while this has roughly the same approach (basically a 'throw in everything but the kitchen sink and hope it works' ethos), it's considerably more focused and more conscious of the bigger picture - The Creature Cocoa may ultimately deal in fragments, but each of the four tracks here feels like it was concieved as a song rather than as a selection of individual moments strewn together.

A very impressive piece of work, then. Better yet, it's available for free from Bandcamp; that has to make it worth 20 minutes of anybody's time, surely? There is a slight question mark over it, in that it's tempting to wonder how this could be expanded over a full album, and there's nothing here to suggest convincingly whether or not it would work, other than the way it shows off the scope of The Creature Cocoa's imagination; apart from that, there's not a lot you can say to criticize this. It's original, fun, compelling, and brisk enough to leave you wanting more.